The mystery of silk: a brief global history of the remarkable material

Recommendable! However, the speaker is not very easy to understand.

Uganda eyes global market with revitalized silk production

With technical assistance from China! 😊

Silk, Seduction, And Sin: The Renaissance Art Of Passion with Waldemar Januszczak

Very recommendable! Venice, the capitol of glass and much more!

"It was Venice that invented the reclining Venus"!

"A bull with a foot fetish!"

Don't miss the other great art documentaries by Waldemar Januszczak!

Venice: Bridge of Tits ("It takes its name ("Bridge of the Tits") from the use of the bridge by prostitutes, who were encouraged to stand topless on the bridge and in nearby windows")

A Clue About Glue

Posted: 6/7/2019

No pun intended! But the English language offers some funny conjectures … (Here is another one: ingestion sometimes ends in indigestion; but I digress)  

Today, I read this interesting and very promising article: First-ever spider glue genes sequenced, paving way to next biomaterials breakthrough Huge spider glue genes proved exceptionally challenging to sequence, could lead to organic pest control and more (published 6/5/19)

A research paper published by two women! Both researchers have worked at the U.S. Army Research Lab, which also funded the research. Thus, will this research be also weaponized at some point (just kidding)?

Some salient quotes from from article or original research paper abstract (emphasis added):

1. “The innovative method they employed could pave the way for others to sequence more silk and glue genes, which are challenging to sequence because of their length and repetitive structure.”challenging to sequence because of their length and repetitive structure
2. “There are more than 45,000 known species of spiders, each of which makes between one and seven types of silk. ”
3. “An individual orb weaving spider can spin up to seven different types of silk, each with unique functions and material properties.”
4. “... the longest silk gene [previously] sequenced was about 20,000 base pairs … our gene is 42,000 bases long ...”
5. “Most spidroins [spider fibroins] are encoded by extremely large, highly repetitive genes that cannot be sequenced using short read technology alone, as the repetitive regions are longer than read length”

Nice, the full research paper is available as a PDF file from the publisher here! Here is the link to the paper by publisher.